[Musings] Its 2am and I am awake redux

Again I find myself awake at 02:00. This time I am channelling my restlessness into getting the new version of JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit) working and finishing the initial base install flash archive of Solaris 10 1/06, which will be the first Solaris 10 via jumpstart image my workplace will have. It has been a good learning experience. I have learned a lot about JET and about Solaris 10. I had to do a bit of post-install scripting to get a few bugs fixed. JET has this nasty habit of not genning SSH keys for some reason and that means when it is done with the install sshd won't start and instead will go into a maintenance mode. 'svcs -x' does not give any really useful information. Doing a bit of digging I found that sshd will not start unless host keys are present (duh), after confirming that /etc/ssh did not contain any keys I whipped up a quick script that genned the SSH keys (DSA only) as well as performing some other configuration (enabling NTP, hardening inetd, disabling print services (we use LPRng), adding HDS support to mpxio, adding a smarthost to sendmail, etc.). I then create a flash archive once I was satisfied that the OS is configured to a base minimal level. This archive will be the 'golden image' upon which further customizations will be made until a working production archive image is done. The next step is to add the freeware and utilities that we need to the image (such as LPRng, emacs, nano, gtar, gcc, binutils, /usr/local/perl, etc.). Once these final customizations are made we will have a working production install image. We are also planning on purchasing some of the new SUN T2000 servers, which are nice, energy efficent, 1U machines that contain the new Niagra chip, which is a single processor with 8 cores, which can service up to 32 threads at once. It is a great app box for things like LDAP, web server, database (like Oracle) and anything that is not floating point computationally intensive as the proc only has a single FPU for 8 cores. The bus is also PCI-E and screams. We have a loaner system that we are going to install a 10Gb ethernet card into and see if we can get above the theoretical maximum of 2.8Gb that we are seeing on systems with PCI-X and 66MHz bus speeds, we will see however as the 10Gb cards we have are PCI-X. Anyway I digress, I mentioned the T2000 as once I have flars built, I will have to build special onces for the T2000s as the new chip technology is different from the 'sun4u' architecture of the other systems, it is 'sun4v' and flash archives must be built to specific target architecture, and currenlty 'sun4v' is only supported on Solaris 10.

Why am I awake? Various reasons. A lot has been pressing on my mind. I am having difficulty balancing work/home/social. A lot to do/I want to do, not enough time. The old story. This job has forced me to be far more social than I am used to and I am a very private person. Adjusting is hard, even after a year. This summer is shaping up to be busy, like last summer was, but the difference is that it is filled with a variety of things I want to do as opposed to a summer of things I had to do (i.e. work on that damn house in the Cities).

I purchased a new (used) bicycle from the local bike shop (Bicycle Sports). It is a Bianchi and I love it. I have only had it for two weeks and have put close to 60 miles on it. This last week has been dismal and rainy, so I have been grounded, which has sucked. This bicycle offers me more than activity and exercise, both of which I need, it also gives me freedom. When I get on the bike and start riding I am transported back in time to when I was 10 years old tooling around on my bike. Carefree, happy, exhilerated.

Ah well enough rambling, back to my flash archive test install, SSH is not starting post install using flash install (as opposed to jumpstart), eventhough I have a script in place to gen new SSH keys, back to debugging, at least in a pinch we can jumpstart a system.